EFF Files Brief in Case Challenging the Use of Insecure Diebold E-Voting Machines Maryland - EFF has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a Maryland case that challenges the integrity of that state's electronic voting machines, which are manufactured by the troubled electronic voting machine company, Diebold Election Systems. EFF presented...

Michael Geist's latest column on copyright law in Canada contains yet another argument for the necessity of Creative Commons licenses: Toronto-area MP Sarmite Bulte is pushing for an interpretation of the law that embraces and codifies permission culture: Although [Bulte's committee] acknowledges that some work on the...

Why offer technology that empowers people to do cool things when you can hobble it to force them to buy cool things? So asks a report by Mako Analysis on SymbianOS phones, which are evidently too smart for their own good: New mobile devices based on a version of...

A group of influential Republican senators have introduced a bill to make permanent the civil liberties-corroding provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that were sold to the public -- and to Congress -- as temporary measures. These provisions are among the most controversial in the Act, and for...

On a panel a few weeks ago, I asked the head lawyer for Apple's iTunes Music Store whether Apple would, if it could, drop the FairPlay DRM from tracks purchased at the Music Store. He said "no." I was puzzled, because I assumed that the DRM obligation...

May 2004 In 1641, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes asked how it is that we can trust our senses. What if, he asked, everything we experience is actually part of a delusion created by an omnipotent demon bent on deceiving us? It turns out...

This just in: the California Institute of Technology and Loyola Law School are presenting a mock trial this Friday, May 21st, to play out a scenario in which a student creates a distributed computing application to crack DRM systems, leading to the criminal prosecution of everyone involved...

The most remarkable testimony at last week's DMCRA hearings was that of former Congressman Allan Swift. Swift was testifying as a private citizen, as a "home recordist." Basically, he's been making "mix tapes" for 54 years: In that time, I have given friends many tapes, cassettes and now...

May 2004
Background
Nearly one-third of American voters – over 50 million people – live in districts that will use electronic voting terminals to elect the next president.1 However, widespread reports of voting terminal failures,2 and growing concern about the security3 of these machines, are fueling fierce debate over...

A trio of responses to the DMCRA hearing on Wednesday: Seth Finkelstein: It would great if everyone could just take a loyalty oath at the start and thus get beyond the endless querying about whether they believe in some sort of heretical radicalism. Something like: "I am not...

Donation to Support Patent-Busting Project San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the leading civil liberties organization working to defend freedom in the digital world, has received a $50,000 grant from The Parker Family Foundation of Lexington, Massachusetts, for EFF's Patent-Busting Project. “We are concerned about the growing number...

After Daylong Debate, the Future of H.R. 107 Looks Bright Washington, D.C. - Today at 10:00 AM., the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Trade, Commerce and Consumer Protection held a hearing on H.R. 107, also known as the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA). Introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher...